Taking an intimate tour of 27 weekend escapes, revealing in wonderful detail both interior and exterior views, readers learn from the owners what makes each place special and why the perfect weekend home isn't limited to any one part of the country, nor is it defined by size or style of architecture. 255 color photos.

40 vacation homes from around the world, reflecting a wide range of cultures, styles and ways of life, feature in this book. From Sweden to South Africa, New England to Mexico and Mexico to Lamu, it reveals the extraordinary variety of places where people go to get away from it all.

The elegant dwellings featured in Elle Decor Country Homes are not decorated with stenciled geese and gingham slipcovers; rather, they illustrate a more sophisticated type of country, from rustic traditional to romantic European as well as striking contemporary interpretations of the farmhouse. Among the homes featured are those belonging to Calvin Klein, Richard Meier, John Frieda, and Charlie Rose. Exploring six distinct variations - Mediterranean, cottage, grand style, contemporary, family home, and cabin - the book offers informative commentary and 250 beautiful color photos that trace the evolution of each style, and provides specific suggestions for creating a particular look.

At head of title: House beautiful.

'A masterpiece of social history' Daily Mail There is nothing quite as beautiful as an English country house in summer. And there has never been a summer quite like that Indian summer between the two world wars, a period of gentle decline in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. Real life in the country house during the 1920s and 1930s was not always so sunny. By turns opulent and ordinary, noble and vicious, its shadows were darker. In The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the truth about a world half-forgotten, draped in myth and hidden behind stiff upper lips and film-star smiles. Drawing on hundreds of memoirs, on unpublished letters and diaries, on the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and unhappy heiresses and bullying butlers, The Long Weekend gives a voice to the people who inhabited this world and shows how the image of the country house was carefully protected by its occupants above and below stairs, and how the reality was so much more interesting than the dream.

This is the first book to reveal the eccentric treasure trove of commercial, civic, and domestic architecture that makes Palm Springs a true oasis of progressive design. Not merely regarded as a Hollywood playground, golf enclave, or retirement mecca, Palm Springs is also a bastion of idiosyncratic modernism that is unparalleled in the world. Creating stunning homes and an impressive array of other buildings in the middle of the desert, such masters as Albert Frey, Richard Neutra, John Lautner, R. M. Schindler, Donald Wexler, and Lloyd Wright exercised their creative potential there. Palm Springs Weekend explores everything from the grandiose, such as Neutra's Kaufmann house, to the more humble features of the city--motels, trailer homes, and the ubiquitous metal and concrete sunscreens that shade them. Filled with hundreds of archival and contemporary photographs, elevations, and vintage ephemera, Palm Springs Weekend reveals an inimitable city where modern design, Hollywood glamour, and the desolate drama of the desert coalesce.